Mayor of Milan, Giuseppe Sala today chaired the first meeting of the Global Mayors COVID-19 Recovery Task Force, established to drive forward an economic recovery that improves public health, reduces inequality and addresses the climate crisis. The Task Force will explore ways for the economic recovery from COVID-19 to get people back to work, while ensuring climate breakdown doesn’t become an even bigger crisis for the global economy and the lives and livelihoods of communities worldwide.

“In both matters of climate change and this global pandemic, mayors and their cities are gravely impacted and have to be at the forefront of finding ways to rebuild our economy, particularly in ways that can advance our climate change goals. As we get New Orleanians back to work, we need to focus on creating job opportunities in emerging green and blue sectors — such as urban water management, local manufacturing, coastal restoration, solar, and energy efficiency,” said Mayor Cantrell. “Not only are we creating sustainable jobs for today and tomorrow, we will also improve the long-term health and stability of our city.”

And what is this C40 Cities outfit? It’s exactly what you expected…

Around the world, C40 Cities connects 96 of the world’s greatest cities to take bold climate action, leading the way towards a healthier and more sustainable future. Representing 700+ million citizens and one quarter of the global economy, mayors of the C40 cities are committed to delivering on the most ambitious goals of the Paris Agreement at the local level, as well as to cleaning the air we breathe. The current chair of C40 is Mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti; and three-term Mayor of New York City Michael R. Bloomberg serves as President of the Board. C40’s work is made possible by our three strategic funders: Bloomberg Philanthropies, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), and Realdania.

In other words, it’s a global warming thing and a colossal waste of time.

Cantrell is presiding over the death of New Orleans’ economy and an unemployment rate in Orleans Parish which has to be well above 25 percent at this point – when the numbers finally come out for April, it’s likely to be breathtaking. Consider that the New Orleans metro area, which had a 5.6 percent unemployment rate in March (that was 30 percent higher than the national average even before all this started), employed 582,000 people according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of that number, 91,700 were employed in “leisure and hospitality” – bars, restaurants, hotels and so forth. And another 111,500 were employed in “trade, transportation and utilities” – which would include the cab drivers in the city.

So that’s well more than a third of the employment of the metro area, and it’s our bet a disproportionate number of those people live in Orleans Parish, rather than the suburbs. And how much of those two sectors is still standing right now?

We’re knocking on the door of 350,000 new Louisianans out of work. How many of those people are in the New Orleans area, and specifically Orleans Parish?

You could be looking at 100,000 people in Orleans Parish currently out of work.

And New Orleans’ mayor is running around with the news she’s on a task force with the mayors of Freetown and Medellin to revive the city’s economy so that it doesn’t produce global warming. Meanwhile, she’s refusing to allow restaurant patrons to sit outside with take-out food.